Twitter Etiquette–Twitter Best Practices
A friend of mine recently asked me for a link to a Twitter Etiquette source. Here’s the gist of the email I sent him.
http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/best_practices
I use twitter to talk about my niches AND make comments through the day if I happen to see something I like. I occasionally tweet something personal, but that is about 20% of the time.
I find blogs to follow and then tweet about those blog posts. I occasionally put my own blog post into the twitter stream.
I do not auto follow people who follow me. I just end up with spammers. I will go through my followers and follow back people who are interesting and engaging and REAL.
I do not send an auto DM (Direct Message) to people when they follow me. That is usually a useless thing to do.
I do have a program that I use to follow people. It searches for people with common interests or searches for people who fit my demographic for a particular market. I use Tweet Adder for that. Do not overuse something like this.
You should get your name if you can. My Twitter URL is www.twitter.com/DaveAustin
You can get your business name too. Getting both is a good idea.
I don’t tweet about stuff that is useless. “Going to bed now.” “Have a coffee” etc. That does not ad value to the twitter world.
Use TweetDeck to group people so you can focus a small group of people to talk to. I have an small group of people and I care about what they say and I engage them. I have to have this group because otherwise I have to watch a stream of 7500 people who follow me. It’s full of crap. Setting up a group is a very effective way to focus who you listen to. I usually am adding several people a week to this group, because I see that they have something valuable (to me) to say.
My Summary:
Try to add value.
Try to Engage people.
Talk to people who say things that are interesting.
Talk to people in your market.
DON’T get sucked in. Just twitter a couple of times a day in a block of time and then leave twitter so you can get other stuff done.
Hope this helps.
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